


everything will glow for you

by roseisreturning



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Femslash February, Femslash February Trope Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-14 11:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3408128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseisreturning/pseuds/roseisreturning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to "be a part of the love club," logically, following the end of The Voice, to tours and record deals and moves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everything will glow for you

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: food, sex mention

Delphine has an interview scheduled first thing the day after the last show and leaves your hotel room at four in the morning to make it to the studio. She kisses your forehead before she does, the traces of a habit from YouTube videos and site exclusives and BTS photos. (It’s nice anyway, her hair brushing against your face before she says goodbye. There aren’t cameras, at least, and this comforts you, somehow, into believing it’s less of a lie.)

You get out of bed maybe four hours later, tweet about how excited you are about it all, then go on a donut run sixteen minutes before the interview is set to air.

Delphine texts you on your way back. _Channel 7! Yours? :)_

_yeah, headed back now w/ donuts_

She arrives with two minutes to spare and three dollars in her hand.

“Bavarian cream?” you ask.

Delphine makes a humming sound as she settles into your bed. “You are terrible for me, you know,” she says.

“Yeah. Thirty seconds?”

She nods. She’s already taken a bite from her donut, and there are traces of her lipstick on what’s left of it. You think about mentioning this, because it’s the kind of thing Delphine laughs about, but the commercials end within moments of the thought.

It’s surreal, above anything else, to see Delphine on television—“Hey,” you say of her, knowing an eyeroll will follow “it’s _Delscreen.”_ —then beside you, eating a donut while looking almost entirely the same. You’re used to watching each other, of course, used to the performance and to the aftermath. You’re used to the division. (You’re not used to Delphine’s hand in yours as an entirely separate version of her admits to falling for you.)

(What you mean is, you’re not used to having to remind yourself that these are separate versions of her.)

Your Delphine only takes her eyes off the screen the moment before their Delphine dedicates a song to you. Your Delphine squeezes your hand, but it feels more like theirs.

_It started with a whisper, and that was when I kissed her._

Within the first three weeks post- _The Voice_ , you promise your parents that you’re doing something with your life, and it’s not actually a lie. You have months before you can sign anything, before you can move on, but there are people interested in you now, even when you’re in NBC purgatory.

Delphine lets you in on her apartment a month later, when your parents and your savings are looking less hopeful.

It’s awkward, most days, because even you don’t know if you’re together, but you split rent and Netflix payments, which essentially makes up for it.

Still, on Valentine’s Day, you record a video with her, and she asks later if you’re as desperately lonely as she is.

“Uh, nah,” you say. “I mean, I am, but I have, like, just enough romance in me to _not_ have Valentine’s Day sex with you or whatever.”

“Okay,” she says, then laughs. (She loves you, you know, at least in some way, but has at length explained that the odds that any of this love will align in the right ways are small at best. “From experience,” she said, not quite smiling, “it’s easier to pretend there’s no chance.”)

You go out the night of anyway, because you have pretty dresses to wear and gossip to uphold. You split dessert and hold hands on the way out and kiss for a just-over-appropriate amount of time on the sidewalk.

You spend the rest of the night in her baggiest t-shirt watching every movie in Netflix’s _Gay and Lesbian_ category that doesn’t reek of death.

In March, Delphine writes a love song and calls it “Cosima.”

You’re past trying to figure out what’s real by now, past even caring, but you help her with some of the harmonies and braid her hair until she starts to fall asleep.

You get lazy in L.A. You have small appearances sometimes, tiny performances often joined by Delphine leading up to work on the tour.

You have an unimaginable amount of time for it, for rehearsals and choreography and promotion, and Delphine, somehow, always ends up beside you.

(She’s something like the star, you know, but even her top songs are the ones she sings with you, the ones rehearsed with lazy posture and the brushing of hands.)

Following most of these, you will curl up into Delphine and tweet a reminder to buy tickets ASAP. You nudge her, she retweets it, and you hum the chorus to a song she hasn’t written just yet. (This is the way it happens between you, the humming of notes against shoulders until something sounds right. She'll write for you, too, sometimes, when she thinks of a line too sugarsweet for her own voice.)

"Thirty-six days," she says, because they've drilled it into you. Ticket sales were good this year, and they had to be. (There hasn't been a tour for years after last time's disaster, but everyone assures everyone that everything will work, which is only sometimes a comfort.)

"Then, like, thirty-two?" you ask.

"Thirty-two. Then twenty, and thirty."

"Thirty's too perfect," you tell her, desperate for the extra hours. "We should make it thirty-one."

"Thirty-one is the end of the month," she says. You've had this conversation before.

"So that's, like, 120?"

"118," she says, the long way, _one hundred and eighteen_ , but without hesitation.

"Mmm." You don't trust yourself to say anything else.

"Looking forward to it?" She’s smiling _that way_ , and you want to plead for the seconds.

You laugh, almost. "Nah," you say. "It's gonna be way too awkward living with you after we break up."

Delphine smiles. She’s tracing hearts across your arm now, and you think about asking if this will stop, too. “We’ll make it work,” she says. “It’s better to phase us out.”

Minutes later, you take a selfie together and caption it with nothing but hearts.

Fourteen days until the tour and 102 until the breakup, Delphine creates a twelve-hour playlist of songs to listen to on the road. Of these, seven hours and thirty-eight minutes come directly from other playlists— _Favorites_ , _90s_ , _Motivation,_ and _Cosima._

(You know it’s just your makeout playlist, but the giddiness of seeing your name this way never really leaves. You try not to think about whether she’ll rename it when your time runs out.)

You prerecord videos for the weeks you’ll miss. More often than not, Delphine is in them, glancing adoringly at you at agreed intervals and talking half to you, half to the camera. Grounded. Not quite used to this yet.

Her hands are still soft against your skin, no matter how little of this is real, and her voice still fits perfectly with yours.

_When we go crashing down, we come back every time._

Paul takes to braiding Cal’s hair on tour, as you do Delphine’s, and there’s a lazy kind of loveliness in this. You can’t talk with Delphine the way you do at home, half-vulnerable half-terrible murmurs, but Delphine’s smiles feel less like black holes and more like the supernovae that precede them, and this is enough.

It’s easy, at least, to be this way. You know who you are now, most of the time, and you revel in being so simply in love.

Delphine does, too, you think, sings love songs with you even when the battery on your camera is dead and there’s no signal for miles. And it feels right.

“Enchanted” carries over, from the live shows to your channel to every stop on the tour, and your name gets caught in its execution. Every day, they love it, and Delphine looks down, laughing, before she goes on.

_This night is sparkling, don’t you let it go._

She confesses to you, through text, some Texan plane out the window, that she would date you, probably, if you weren’t already pretending. You smile at her beside you. “Yeah?” you say, and there is an excitement in your voice you had hoped wouldn’t surface.

She hides her face with her hair the way she does after singing your name. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like an act.

You’ve already talked about a breakup video, about a breakup tweet, and even a livestream, and Delphine still swears that they’ll happen. You need time, she says, to figure things out. (You’re already in too deep, and you think she knows this, but it’s easier to act like you have a choice.)

You aren’t the same, after this; your hands find hers less easily onstage and her voice regains a sort of shyness when she talks about you.

This is what justifies your breakup, in the end, and you laugh about it together as you’re scrolling through comments.

Delphine still has voice memos with your name on them, a ten-second clip of you laughing or twenty minutes of rehashing a song. She says she’ll do something with them, someday. Hide them on an album, maybe, she says, and you record her for the rest of the day in the hopes of beating her to it.

(You still give each other an edge, and this is what you are. You crave love and fame and her, and you can’t enjoy one without the rest.)

You’re on some new label, now, that promises you press and freedom and, upon your first album’s release, another tour. You steal phrases from Delphine, from conversations and her own suggestions, put them into songs without even thinking, takeout orders turned ballads and ballads turned something like love.

“We’ll have to reunite if you keep going this way.”

You smile. (This was the plan, anyway, for both of you, to break up while you could still be in the same room together, then get back together, months later. Almost like none of it was ever a lie.) “I should write faster.”

She doesn’t laugh, necessarily, but you can feel something like it in her chest, and it feels just as nice. “Maybe,” she says.

You spend two months from mid-November in San Francisco, stay with your parents and buy a new calendar, Skype with Delphine and remind yourself not to wear her t-shirts outside of your old room.

You feel like you’re moving backwards, back home, but it’s nice, in a way, to be playing at the same coffee shops you did in college. The tips are bigger and the customers are different, but they’re the same places, in the end, and you love them for it.

Delphine becomes _the ex_ for the first time for you, the name slipped into a breakup song, and a girl drops her number in with a couple dollar bills just before she walks out. You smile and try not to feel guilty.

_So she calls me up and she’s like, “I still love you…”_

You find out via Tumblr that today would be your anniversary, and tweet something vague and romantic in its honor.

Delphine is the first person to favorite it.

You record four videos from home, three Christmas carols and a vlog.

Delphine joins you on “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” even from L.A., light flooding in from behind her, camera moving in and out of focus. It’s not ideal, or even good, but your voices still fit through shitty microphones.

Your parents, at least, think it’s adorable.

You leave for L.A. the morning of New Year’s Eve, camera in hand, and you think about recruiting someone on your flight to film you. You decide this is probably too much, and find yourself, five hours later, with shaky footage of laughter and flowers and the opposite end of the airport.

Delphine grabs your camera from you at some point, angles it down toward you and continues talking as though all of this is natural. “I’m so glad you’re back!”

These are the angles you use, in the end, sound just barely there under a hastily recorded cover.

Delphine has a new love for this, for recording yourselves without the video, loves listening to them, loves picking out what happened when, and she makes you love it too, even as the light of your laptop starts straining your eyes.

_Oh no! What’s happened to my heart?_

You laughed, there, messing up your breathing, and Delphine laughs now, and insists you keep it.

You do.

The second comment (the first, naturally, being _FIRST_!) is three-hundred words dissecting this very second, and Delphine reads them all aloud to you. “I told you it would be good,” she says, and you smile.

“Next video, then,” you say.

“Next video.”

It is, inflammatorily titled, _WE GOT BACK TOGETHER?!_ , and your guilt is barely contained by its truth.

It ends with the kiss, as all things do with you, and you watch the comments flood in together.

This, you think, is your own kind of sunrise.

**Author's Note:**

> whines this au will never leave me and this could have been so much better but i procrastinated i suppose, so this happened. which could actually probably be good, because it makes me slightly more inclined to keep working? i don't know, but hopefully you still enjoyed somewhat, even though this was 90% taylor swift lyrics and an unacceptably low amount of unnecessary touching.


End file.
